“An extraordinary feat”

Emily Wilson, translator of the Iliad and Odyssey

The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse

Over a decade in the making, an anthology unlike any other: newly translated and published in a single volume, the most significant and representative poems from almost a thousand years of Greek and Latin literature

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We live in an age of critical hyperbole, but it is nearly impossible to overstate the contribution to world letters Christopher Childers has made with his anthology of Greek and Latin lyric verse. He has translated it all, and it all bears the mark of his unique poetic intelligence — formally expert, and tonally at home with poems of lament, blessing, curse, wit, and even laugh-aloud humor. He has worked with an unerring diversity of approaches and meters, honoring in his living English the likely intentions of individual long-dead poets who emerge as speaking to their own time, but also ours. … I will be reading [the book] and re-reading it, I know, for the rest of my life.
— MARY JO SALTER, Johns Hopkins University

This book is amazing. I've been reading in it with gratitude and awe.
— ALAN SHAPIRO, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award

…one of the major literary events of this decade.
— ELIJAH PERSEUS BLUMOV, Literary Matters

…a work of staggering ambition, exceptional accomplishment, and surprisingly pleasant reading… The risk of a single translator rendering many poets might be a homogenising flatness, but Childers retunes his instrument for different effects, adding a string, slapping on a capo, going electric or harmonic.
— A.E. STALLINGS, Oxford Professor of Poetry, in the Telegraph

[Christopher Childers] rises to the challenge of making the complex lyrical leaps of Pindar and Bacchylides feel sonically alive. Over and over, I was impressed both by Childers’s technical abilities and his vivid way of evoking the multiple voices in this rich tradition.
— EMILY WILSON, translator of the Iliad and Odyssey

Christopher Childers is the author of The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse.

He has published poems, translations, and prose in The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Agni, Smartish Pace, and Literary Matters. He is the recipient of an NEA Translators’ Fellowship and winner of the Briar Cliff Review Poetry Contest and the Erskine J. Poetry Contest from Smartish Pace. His poem “Miasma” will appear in the forthcoming edition of Best American Poetry.

Christopher holds a BA in Classics from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA in Poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He currently lives in Baltimore, MD and teaches Latin at the Gilman School, but will soon be moving to Los Angeles, CA, where his wife will pursue a residency in pathology.